Political Ref | September 26, 2025 | Permalink

Last night at at TPUSA event featuring Megyn Kelly, who was supposed to be accompanied by the late Charlie Kirk, a student said Trump contributes to the rhetoric that got Charlie killed. He cited a study that indicates much more of the political violence in America is motivated by right-wing ideology.

The truth is that this study cherry-picks a timeframe that gets the author where she wanted to go. Also, thanks to social media and how it has so fundamentally reshaped the media power dynamic in this country, much of this study is simply antiquated. In short, social media has not been good for the left and they are not dealing with it well. More on that later. First lets look at the study.

This study cites attacks from a selective time period seemingly designed to make it look worse for the right. The study itself notes on p3, from the 1960s to the 1980s, 'domestic terrorism was dominated by far-left ideology.' The 70% number cited by the student, however, conveniently excludes this timeframe because the study excluded it.

The study's conclusion that the 'overall prevalence and deadliness of far-right extremism far outweighs that of the far-left' applies only to the period from 1990-2020. Also, including this particular time period where Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City federal building bombing, but excluding the thirty years prior to that where the left dominated domestic political terrorism, undermines the study's conclusion.

While tragic and devastating, the Oklahoma City bombing represents one act of terror but carries the weight of many in terms of fatalities caused. It's fine to include Oklahoma City, but a fair study would also include a longer timeframe to offset peculiarities in the data like Oklahoma City. Had the study included the period from 1960 to 1990, the motivation of domestic terrorists would be far more balanced in terms of right versus left.

Last, if we really want to get a grasp on what's going on right now, we should throw out all timeframes prior to the onset of social media dominance. Social media has so dramatically impacted the political dynamic in the West that looking at data prior to its widespread dominance essentially amounts to false equivalence, or comparing apples to oranges.

Social media has changed everything. Social media has emboldened the right politically, aiding its rise to power thanks to the democratization of media coverage. Now everyone has a voice instead of just a few dominant left-leaning media voices. But much to the left's dismay, social media has weakened the left in inverse proportion to the level it has emboldened the right.

How did social media embolden the right but devastate the left? When the three major broadcast networks, the NY Times and the Washington Post dominated most media coverage, left-leaning Antifa types were more content with politics in America. Afterall, the radical left who pushed the violence of the period from the 1960s to the 1980s had ascended to power in the media and dominated the narrative. The left of the 1960s and their ideological successors, often their children, ran the legacy media and continue to.

The right rebelled against this political reality and we saw an increase in violence in this period from that side, from 1990 to 2015. But once social media took hold in 2015, everything changed. The left has been far more violent since then, as the study notes in the abstract (p1) and in the conclusion (p12). The study doesn't deal with the last five years, but this timeframe includes some residual BLM violence, two assassination attempts on Trump, Charlie Kirk's assassination and now an attempt to kill ICE agents.

Many of the leftist voices that dominated media through 2015, who have lost their monopoly on power, have used language more likely to motivate leftist violence. They frame Trump and his supporters as Nazis and fascists. This language is ubiquitous both in the legacy media and the rhetoric of Democratic politicians.

Bottom line, the study you have heard cited by this student and by left-wingers all over the media is selective. It cherry-picked a timeframe where right wing violence was up.

When looking at the whole picture we see that in the fifty-five years from 1960 to 2015, violence was fairly balanced in terms of right versus left. Leftist violence dominated from 1960-1990. Right-leaning violence dominated from 1990-2015. Since 2015, however, violence is undoubtedly dominated by the left. The left hates the empowerment of the right by social media and they have turned to violence to express their rage.

Leftists simply must accept the new normal, that the right has an equal voice in the media thanks to social media. Until they learn to debate the right as equals, we will continue to see leftist violence often motivated by bitter hangers on in the leftist legacy media. Alternatively they could again try to censor the right by shutting them out of social media, but that strategy has already failed and would likely fail again.